I stared at him in awe.
Me, Jim Makin, I’d taken Big Sam Cannon.
“God almighty!” I said reverently.
His gun had fallen out of its holster onto the floor, but Big Sam wasn’t interested in it or in anything else, except being sick under my desk. I picked up the gun and put it in my pocket.
He was groaning and being very sick, and it was nothing you’d care to watch, so I left.
I must have walked twenty blocks, going no place, not thinking much, nor feeling much, except that queer, happy sensation I’d gotten when I lowered the boom on Big Sam. Prognosis negative or no prognosis negative, that had been a fine feeling. And something else came with it too — the germ of an idea. An idea that grew.
At my apartment, I went to the phone and dialed a number. I waited, counting the fourteen rings. Then she answered:
“Hello?”
“Revita? It’s Jim.”
“Oh.” There was distrust in her voice, and I didn’t blame her. She’d hired me to find her husband, and I’d found him two weeks ago, but I hadn’t told her. I’d been afraid she’d take it to the law, and the law would take it to Ernie Fidako — not that they could prove anything on Ernie Fidako — and afterwards Ernie would take it back to me. I’d been plenty scared of Ernie Fidako yesterday. Now I gave it to her straight:
“About your husband—”
“You’ve found him?”
“He’s dead, Revita.”
There wasn’t a sound. No gasp, no tears, no nothing. I could see her face in my mind — oval, olive skinned, lovely, with full lips, short straight nose, dark eyes that were almost too big — a sensitive face, but with a strength under it that was the Indian part of her.
“I’m sorry, Revita.”
“Who — killed him?” Nobody had mentioned murder, but she knew. “Was it Ernie Fidako?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of his men.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
She was silent a long time. Maybe she was fingering that needle-sharp dagger she carried in her garter above the knee; or maybe she was holding her crucifix and praying — it would be one or the other. I said:
“Fidako knows I’ve got you hidden out, and that I was working for you. You’ve got to get out of town.”
“Where could I possibly go to?”
“Go home. Back to Mexico. And take the money with you. It’s as much yours as anybody’s.”
She didn’t answer, so I went on:
“And hurry. There’s no time to pack anything but the money. Take a taxi to the airport; buy a ticket to Phoenix, Arizona, and take the bus from there to Nogales. Getting the money across the border may be a problem—”
“I know how to do it.”
She probably did. “Okay, that’s it,” I said.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing. We’re square.”
“You’re sure — about my husband—”
“Yes. I’ll see that he has proper burial.”
“But I—”
“I’ll take care of it, and I’ll let you know where. Right now, the important thing is you. And listen—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry about who killed him. I’ll find the guy; and I’ll take care of him too. I swear it.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was easier. “Good-bye, Jim.”
“Good luck, kid.”
After she hung up, I sat there, alone with old prognosis negative again. But I wasn’t paying a lot of attention now, because this idea was still growing in my head. It was a fine idea. I liked it. In a way, it was like planning a party.
It was almost dark now. I pulled the shades, switched on the lights, and took Big Sam’s gun out of my pocket.
It was a .38 Smith and Wesson Hammerless with a three inch barrel. A lovely little gun, the kind you can carry in your pants pocket, and draw without any hammer snagging in the pocket. A small gun, packing a hell of a wallop. I opened it up, sighted up the barrel, and like everything about Big Sam, the gun was dirty.
I cleaned it, oiled it, wiped off the excess oil, checked the loads, and put it together, while I thought about Revita Rosales.
You’d call her a wetback — at least she was in the United States illegally — but there are two sides to everything. In Mexico when the hard times hit or your luck goes bad, you’ve got no social security or job insurance to fall back on. You run out of money and you go hungry, and if you go hungry long enough, you die. And nobody does a thing about it.
And all the time, right across the border, there’s the United States like a fat fairyland, where jobs are for the asking, and even the dogs don’t go hungry.
The U.S. Immigration Service says you can’t go over there; but there are guys like Ernie Fidako that can smuggle you across and arrange a job for you. Not a good job. The formers who hire wetbacks don’t have to pay good wages. But after Mexico it seems like a fortune. Even after Ernie Fidako takes a whopping chunk of every dollar, it’s still enough to live on.
And it still beats Mexico.
But not if you’re pretty like Revita. The pretty ones are too valuable to waste on farms; and Ernie Fidako lines up a far different and far uglier job for them — after he gets through with them himself.
Revita’s husband was sent up the river to pick tomatoes, with the promise he would be rejoined with his wife as soon as more jobs opened up. Revita P She went to Ernie Fidako’s house. She was to be a housemaid, but she soon found out what that meant.
And right then she got the only break she got since she left Mexico. Ernie Fidako was careless with money. He made a lot of it, and he wasn’t much afraid of anybody trying to heist it. The third day, after Ernie left the house, Revita pried open three cabinets, and the third one contained sixty thousand dollars, just stacked there like a bunch of cigar coupons with rubber bands around them.
Revita put them in a paper sack, and walked out.
Now she had to find her husband. She’d lived a while in Nogales on the Mexican side, so she knew about taxicabs. And she’d heard about private detectives too; only she’d gotten it all cockeyed. The way she got it, detectives were like priests or lawyers — you told them something and they were obligated not to reveal it.
She found a cab driver who spoke Spanish, and he helped her find a private detective who spoke Spanish. Me, Jim Makin. She put a thousand dollars of Ernie Fidako’s money on my desk; and I rented a house for her to hide in, and I went out to look for her husband.
You understand, ordinarily I wouldn’t have touched the job with a forty-foot pole; but it was a lot of dough, and I needed it for the clinics and specialists. So I took it.
What happened to her husband? I got the first part of the story in whispered Spanish over a jug of bum sherry from a couple of copper-faced characters who had disappeared like smoke when I went back the next day to confirm it. It seems Elpidio Rosales had wanted his wife back. He’d raised hell about it for two days and had gotten exactly nothing except a black eye; so the second night he’d pulled out, presumably headed for the nearest law; and that’s the last the two characters had seen of him.
The rest of the story was in a three-inch item in the paper about a nameless Mexican transient fished out of the river with his throat cut from ear to ear. The description fitted Elpidio Rosales. And E. R. was tattooed on his left arm, as Revita had said.
I sat there, Big Sam’s gun in my hand, thinking about all of it, and planning my party; then the phone rang, and I answered it.
“Jim” — it was Revita’s voice, soft and taut — “some men are at my door!”
“Police?”
“I don’t know. I peeked through the curtain and one of them is all cut around the mouth, and his nose is swollen—”